WSJ: I cannot help feeling that we all, the entire country, have been condemned to that wasted era. Every time Russia wakes, it wakes not to the next day, but to the previous one. It is a characteristic of every Russian to have been born into an empire: Russian orthodox, communist, postcommunist, whatever.

One could attach the label ‘Déjà vu’ to everything that is going on in contemporary Russia. Once again we have an autocracy. Once again the courts serve the authorities instead of the law. Once again, the censors, the spirit of enslavement. Once again, the lie, the showing off, and the life principle: “It is better to stoop too low than not low enough.” In the new Russian empire, even the old Soviet anthem, personally selected by Stalin, has been restored.

The current Olympics painfully resemble the Moscow Olympics. Once again, state propaganda, as it did then, assures us that “sports are outside politics.” But under a regime that has political prisoners, everything is politics, including sports.